The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, July 03, 2016

Red Star Over Trump

I’m ready to call bullsh*t on the notorious “Red Star of
David” anti-Trump meme that has swept the Intertubes.

Stars of David are not red (blue border on white field); ghetto stars used by
the Nazis were yellow; and the red star, among other things, is the shoulder
badge of the US Army’s 6th Infantry Division.The six-sided star is part of the library of
shapes in Microsoft Word and Paint, and it provides a nice big field to insert some
derogatory phrasing.

In my version of Word, by the way, the default fill color is
blue—Israel blue!—and I had undo the blue and put in the red fill. Hmmm.

And one really has to wonder if Trump—who presumably has the
white nationalist vote sewed up, has a Jewish son-in-law, and is determinedly
trying to get into Sheldon Adelson’s wallet with pro-Israel rhetoric at the
moment—really decided this was the occasion to make a derogatory anti-Semitic association
with Hillary Clinton and her affinity for large helping of cash from corporate
and, via the Clinton Foundation, foreign sources, many of which are from the
unpopular Gulf/Muslim quadrant.

A VC-funded media operation, Mic, won the Internets on July
3 by finding
a cache of /pol/, an “anti-PC” 8chan operation with the offending
image.It subsequently traced the post
back to the twitter feed of @FishBoneHead1.I was not particularly impressed by Mic’s attribution of anti-Semitism
along the lines of “Of note is the file
name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg, potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code HH…”

By the time I got to it, the @FishBoneHead account had been
deleted and all I could do was scroll through the mentions for
a sense of the milieu.As far as I could tell, virulently
anti-Clinton with a side order of “Obama betraying America to the Muslims”.

No More Mister Nice Blog was able to see @FishBoneHead1
before it disappeared, and his conclusions
appear to be similar to mine (with the caveat that some of the anti-Semitic
imagery was reportedly scrubbed from the TL prior to deletion):

FishBoneHead1 is a
jerk, but he doesn't appear to be a Jew-hating jerk. He just likes making dumb
images out of simpleminded right-wing memes, using the most obvious graphic
techniques. He probably thought a six-pointed star would accommodate the words
better -- if he'd wanted to dog-whistle, the star would have been yellow.

I concur.So I doubt either @FishBoneHead or Trump were engaged in anti-Semitic dogwhistling with the red star.

I do not agree with the assessment,
in other words, of Sam Stein and Sam Levine of the Huffington Post, as
summarized in their headline: Donald
Trump Launches Blatantly Anti-Semitic Attack Against Hillary Clinton: This is
not a dog whistle.It’s not subtle.

Excuse me.If it was
meant as a dog whistle, Trump would have kept it up, denied the truth, reveled
in the publicity, in other words dog whistled as he worked raking in the
cash.Instead he hastily took down the star
tweet in a fug of embarrassment, replacing it with a red meatball whose offense
to the sensibilities of the Japanese royal family was miraculously ignored.

My anti-Semito-skepticism is also fueled by the fact that
accusations of anti-Semitism have become the lingua franca of liberal political agitation at home as well as
abroad.The Blairites in the UK’s Labour
Party—who have worked hand-in-glove with political consultants in the United
States since the Bill Clinton days—mounted a ferocious attack on the purported
anti-Semitism of Jeremy Corbyn over a period of months, presumably as part of
their “Corbyn coup” scheme.It recently
climaxed with the Guardian bigfooting
Corbyn’s report on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party by spuriously claiming
that Corbyn had analogized Israel to ISIS.

As to how the pack attack on the red star began, I direct
you to this quote
from the New York Times on the kerfuffle:

Before the post came
down, Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, asked on his
personal Twitter account, “Why is there a Star of David?”

Cry Havoc! Etc. etc.

Allies of the Clinton campaign “saw their opportunities and they took ‘em”
in other words, creating a media firestorm over unlucky clipart choices and, I
expect, to their relief managing to distract somewhat from the fact that their
candidate had just spent several hours with the FBI discussing her dodgy e-mail
server.

Make no mistake about it, the Trump campaign has a serious
anti-Semitism problem. But the question
is, how much of it is Trump and how much of it is his supporters, and how much is
torched off courtesy of Clinton, Trump’s myriad other political enemies, and a
hostile media.

Is Trump the active impresario of an anti-Semitic movement?

The evidence seems to indicate otherwise.

The Alt Right movement of deliberately offensive transgressive
provocateurs who gave us Gamergate has adopted Trump as its mascot thanks to
his cultivation of disgruntled white conservative males, and their web-centric
followers provide much of the torrent of on-line anti-Semitic invective
unleashed against Jews who, in their estimation, offend against “Daddy Trump”.

But Trump himself relies on xenophobia against Hispanics and
Muslims and racially-inflected smears against President Obama to fire up his
base.That’s enough.He doesn’t need to play the anti-Semite card.

Quite the opposite, I think.

I doubt Trump is particularly grateful to Alt Right for
adding “anti-Semite” to his portfolio of epithets, given the historical/Israel/fundraising/media
headaches it brings along.The section
of electorate for whom “he’s going down the path of Hitler” is a matter of fear
and execration is pretty big…as is the benefit to Clinton of successfully
associating Trump with the ultimate political taboo of Fascism.

To serious proponents of Fascism and white supremacy who key
on the alleged Jewish menace, Trump is not Hitler but he’ll have to do until a
real Hitler comes along, as Dylan Matthews wrote for
Vox:

The leading actual
neoreactionaries are not fans of Donald Trump. "Trump appears to have no
ideology at all and very little historical/intellectual awareness of his
context," Moldbug — who now just goes by his birth name, Curtis Yarvin —
writes in an email.

Yarvin apparently would like to see Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos
take the reins, by the way.Looking
forward to the Washington Post coverage of that particular movement.

And reporters have yet to find the Holy Grail—Trump making
explicitly bigoted remarks about Jews.

However, Trumpland is a particularly hostile space for
Jewish intellectuals and journalists if they criticize Trump.In fact, members of the Alt Right crowd (who
also congregate on the 8chan message boards that posted the offending red star
graphic) delight in threatening and intimidating targeted Jewish journalists,
to the point they fear for their lives, as WNYC
reported:

Mandel [a
journalist critical of Trump who writes for the Forward & other
publications] estimates she has faced thousands of anti-Semitic messages online,
mostly from self-identified white nationalists who are passionate Trump
supporters -- as made clear by their exhortations to "make America great
again" and the Trump imagery in their user profiles. The messages she has
received ("Die, you deserve to be in an oven," for example) are tame
compared to the pictures (Mandel's face superimposed on that of a
Holocaust victim).

…

Mandel estimated that
she has blocked 1,000 users on Twitter who have gone after her.

…

So a couple of months ago Mandel
packed up the kids and went to the gun shop. "...And I'm like, 'I need a
gun because people are mean to me on the Internet,'" Mandel remembered.
"And like, yes, that's true, but people are publishing my phone number and
address and I've written for some of the most prominent places on the Internet
this election season, and that sort of makes you a target."Mandel got her gun and alerted local
police, who now monitor her home. Mandel also wrote a piece for the Jewish
Forward: "My
Trump Tweets Earned Me So Many Anti-Semitic Haters That I Bought A Gun." It
went viral.

Julia Ioffe and Jonathan Weisman of the NY Times got similar
attention from pro-Trump anti-Semites.Felix
Salmon also got the treatment for his criticisms of Brexit (a Trump fave), as I
recall. There are others.

Don’t try to discount the impact by parsing the authenticity
of the threats.The fear is real.So is the anger.

NY Magazine ran a very
useful piece by Jesse Singal on the association of Trumpism with racial bigotry.It focused on Ben Shapiro, a right wing media
figure who left Breitbart, a major platform for Trump, and endured the full
range of anti-Semitic castigation as a result.

Shapiro doesn’t spend
much time parsing the distinction between “real” and “trolling” online
anti-Semitism. “[Yiannopoulos’s—the media star of the Alt Right] argument seems
to be that an alt-right person tweeting a gas chamber at me in a way that’s
indistinguishable from David Duke tweeting a gas chamber at me, or an alt-right
person calling me a cuck Jewish supremacist, versus David Duke doing the same
thing — it’s my responsibility to attempt to distinguish between the two and
read into their mind a distinction that simply doesn’t exist in objective
reality.”

Awareness of popular anti-Semitism constellating around
Trump—and the unnerving litany of abuse and threats unleashed against Jewish
journalists with Trump not making any serious effort to acknowledge and disavow
it—permeates coverage of his campaign, in my opinion.

The Clinton campaign obviously regards the allegations of
Trump anti-Semitism as campaign gold, accusations that place Trump beyond the
moral pale, stop him in his tracks, and force him to respond. Since Trump is persona non grata among many mainstream
conservative as well as liberal journalists (it’s also a fact that some of the
most conspicuous victims of the Alt Right jihad have been conservative Jewish
journalists), the media appears happy to oblige, even
when innuendo, extrapolation, speculation, and association have to bear an
inordinate share of the evidentiary burden.

So the red star story, despite its dubious circumstances and
context, gets the four-alarm-fire treatment.

I’m in the minority, I’m sure, but I don’t think bad
journalism in a good cause is a good thing.